Somebody grabs you by your squishy end and draws you out of the comfy sticky goo that you were submerged in. You wind yourselves in fear of being crushed. You vaguely see a few worms, winding themselves in the fingers of surprisingly unremarkable humans. You must yourself be such a worm, captive between the fingers of another human, or Norm. The Norm wears goggles and over-sized gloves. Of course, you don't know what that is, now. But you will soon understand. He smiles at you.

While the goo is still dripping off of you, he carries you over to another Norm. Your captor sets you – your little head with its grinding teeth first – onto the neck of this poor fellow.

This year's Game Chef analog game design competition is already halfway through and I thought it could be interesting to share some of my experiences with it and the current status of my design in this episode. A lot of this is quite preliminary, but the basic foundations are likely to stand until the end of the competition.

I have no hopes of winning, but I will certainly submit my game and hopefully find the time to develop it further after the competition. We had a playtest, last night, and everybody had fun with the concept. Also, the rules (as far as we got testing them) seemed to make sense and enrich play. So, I do not need to scrap those entirely.

This year's Game Chef competition has just started. Its theme and four ingedients have been unveiled today. And - surprisingly enough - they are not words but rather pictures. This will complicate my brainstorming session, but is a nice deviation from other contests.

The contest runs from May 17th and 26th 2013, which is the time you have to produce a fully playable (and readable!) analog game of sorts. I encourage you to take part, if you can spare some hours this coming week.

I will be participating and documenting my progress here (maybe in audio form). I already have a playtesting session scheduled. Let's see, what comes of it.

This is the second (and the only one in English language) of three interviews I recorded at the SPIEL 2012 exhibition in Essen.

I talked to Christoffer Krämer who is one of the many creative heads behind Swedish game publisher Gigantoskop. He talks about how they go about their creative process, the internal competitions they make for designing new games, why they put their focus on games with strong themes, how ideas are cheap and why it's best to talk about your game and not be afraid that anybody will steal your idea.

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I (and apparently, he as well) did. Feel free to comment.

I want to inform you that Ryan Macklin's Master Plan podcast will be back for another season of 10 episodes. He is doing a kickstarter to bring it back. I really like the idea of having this (most of the time) awesome RPG design podcast back for more input.

Here comes the third of a series of four interviews I did on my visist to the SPIEL 2011 in Essen. All of these shows will be in English (since the Germans managed to evade my microphones). I hope, you can cope with my teutonic English for the sake of the interviewees.

This interview is with Matt Machell who also shared a booth with Arkenstone Publishing. Matt is a British game designer, publishing small games with a British flavor.

We talk about the reception of his games at the SPIEL, his three games published so far (Covenant, Pulp! and the new, revised The Agency) and some minor topics.

As always, feel free to leave comments (if it's not about my bad English …) and stay tuned for the final interview. Cheers!

Hey, everybody. Here comes the second of a series of four interviews I did on my visist to the SPIEL 2011 in Essen. All of these shows will be in English (since the Germans managed to evade my microphones, somehow). I hope, you can cope with my teutonic English for the sake of the interviewees.

Again, I am sorry for the discrepancy between desired and realized publishing date. On the up side, I think my new mobile recording setup really did its job well so that the interviews should have a far better audio quality than last year.

This second interview is with Eero Tuovinen from Arkenstone Publishing. His company distributes indie and OSR games in Finland and also publishes his own games and translations of indie games. It has been Arkenstone's third attendance to the SPIEL and they might just be coming again next year.

We talk about how indie and OSR games are received at the SPIEL, Eero's efforts to spread the word, news from the Forge-scene and some new, recommended games Eero has with him among other things.

I hope you like it! Feel free to leave comments and feedback, and stay tuned for two more upcoming episodes. Hope to read from you!

Oh, and if you like what you heard, feel free to click those flattr buttons to retrocactively fund my recording equipment.